13/8/09
11:55
Page 1
WYE VALLEY LIFE
WYE VALLEY LIFE
...is your life
FOREST OF DEAN • HEREFORDSHIRE • POWYS • MONMOUTHSHIRE • SOUTH SHROPSHIRE
EMILY ROBB in her comtemporary city home
JULIETTE AUSTEN CHANDLER’S
LEDBURY a food lover’s black and white dream
Education
choose your local schools
birthday boys in the buff, and many other socials
Local
RESTAURANTS REGIONAL RECIPES GOURMET SHOPPING
SEPTEMBER 2009
Pages and pages of
FASHION FOR AUTUMN and where to get it locally
10 Pages OF
Kitchen solutions love your craftsmen
SEPTEMBER 2009 ONLY £2.50
left bank:Layout 1
WVM
Home life
Flair
over five floors Words by Sharon Chilcott Photographs by Richard Weaver
When Emily Robb needed to find a new home for herself and her five children, she set her heart on somewhere in Castle Street Hereford, “Because it’s quiet, pretty and I love hearing the cathedral bells”. 8
WYEVALLEYMEDIA.CO.UK SEPTEMBER 2009
“I wanted somewhere fairly quickly, so I put letters through people’s letter boxes to see if they were interested in selling.” Almost immediately, architect Hugo Mason, whose vacant office building at number 11 had once been one of the finest gentleman’s residences in the city, contacted her. One of a pair, because of its importance, it is Grade II* listed and is set back from the street behind a small garden. Hugo had used it as his office since 1968, but he had left mainstream practice, his firm had moved out to new premises and he was left with an empty building. “Then along came Emily with her five children who were already keen to create a family
home here. I first showed her around when it was fully occupied as an office and to my surprise she fell for it straight away.” “Emily had no previous experience of building projects, let alone the creation of a house from an office. I promised to work closely with her and her children to turn no.11 back into a dwelling. Having carried out many similar projects for private clients in the past I was keen to get my hands really dirty and so I decided to design and manage the work on site myself. Each of the five children, Ben, George, Lara, Jemima and Isobel told me what they wanted and from day one we all worked together as a team.”
Home life WVM
“I wanted them to gasp when they came in and saw it, and they did.”
SEPTEMBER 2009 WYEVALLEYMEDIA.CO.UK
9
WVM
Home life
The resulting house, with its seven bedrooms, four bathrooms, a fine kitchen, dining, drawing and TV room, provides a perfect home for Emily’s family, aged from 5 to17. “The boys have the basement and the girls have the top floor, there are two living floors and I have a floor to myself, so we can get away from each other when we need to and you really wouldn’t know there are so many people living here,” says Emily. Although this is the first home Emily has designed and decorated, her style and creativity have resulted in a ‘wow’ factor in every room – from the modern chandelier in the dining room, the row of enormous Venetian glass light shades in the entrance hallway to the purple sofa in the living room and the red work surfaces in the kitchen. Hugo explains, “Emily was very concerned with the kitchen and the other working parts of the house, and for someone who claimed to have no experience, it was a real eye opener. As it happens the kitchen was eventually made by Giles Mason, Hugo’s son, who has a design comapny. Her artistic ideas for the circulation areas have helped to create light and airy spaces whilst at the same time enhancing the original architectural features of the building to the full”. Says Emily, “One friend told me the décor is very ‘me’, which made me laugh, as it is all slightly eccentric. I had never done a house before and I was very anxious because there was so much time pressure”. The project was scheduled to take just I2 weeks, but although it went over time slightly, the children were able to move in for the start of the new school year as originally planned, even though for a while they had to camp out in the house. 10
WYEVALLEYMEDIA.CO.UK SEPTEMBER 2009
Home life WVM
“There were no carpets because there was a go-slow on production so I couldn’t move the furniture in. We slept in sleeping bags on the underlay and people lent us camping equipment. It was heading towards winter and just as it was getting intolerable and the children were getting pretty fed up, the carpets came.” Several of the other floors have been supplied by White Hall, with the shop just a stones throw away from the property. One of the most imposing rooms in the house is the living room with its eyecatching wallpaper depicting colourful humming birds. “It’s probably after an original Victorian design. I like it because you can constantly hear the birds here, the wood pigeons and ducks from the Castle Green pond and it reflects the atmosphere,” says Emily. The purple sofa, by Julian Chichester, picks up one of the colours in the wallpaper. “The sofa was the first thing I saw that I really wanted. I saw it in a magazine and went up to London to buy it. Then I saw the wallpaper and purely by chance it had the same purple in it,” says Emily. The high-ceilinged room has a pair of double doors opening to a Juliet balcony with white wrought iron balustrades and views over Castle Street. This creates a light, airy feel, which Emily has emphasised by the addition of stylish Perspex wall lights, modern reading lights from Italy, plain white drapes and Perspex curtain rails. This room is on the second floor, and opposite is a family TV room, where striking black and white striped Ikea sofas complement the red walls and curtains. On the floor above, Emily has decorated her own bedroom with a duck egg blue Coles wallpaper etched with burnished gold roses, the tones picked up in her Julian Chichester gold four poster bed and dark gold lustre curtains. Across the hallway an imposing four-poster bed bought in Singapore dominates the guest room, where Emily has complemented flock wallpaper with blue paisley on a slate
grey background with a white bedspread and white curtains. She has made effective use of wallpaper throughout the house but laughs: “The guy who put the wallpaper up couldn’t stand any of it!” Above, on the fifth floor, Emily has created princess-style bedrooms decorated with pink wallpaper for her youngest daughters, Jemima, 5 and Lara, 6. “I wanted them to gasp when they came in and saw it, and they did,” she says. Her eldest daughter, Issy, has a beamed attic room across the corridor and her own bathroom, with colourful Nina Campbell wallpaper depicting fish, and a roll top slipper bath painted pink. Back on the ground floor, Emily’s dining room is furnished with a large oval table and smoked Perspex Louis XV chairs, with the wow factors of a strikingly patterned Paul Smith rug and industrial style chandelier. RGM Fireplaces supplied the unique heating and plumbing systems. The modern kitchen across the hall is distinctive for its red shiny Deco glaze work surfaces and grey, Harewood veneered kitchen units with Japanesestyle black knobs. Emily has picked up the colour of the work surfaces in her large red gas cooker, which she says is the urban alternative to an Aga, and in the red cushion on the window seat which looks out over her small, walled cottage-style garden. Finally, downstairs in the basement, there are rooms for Emily’s two teenage sons, who have individual en-suite wet rooms and a soundproofed music room across a small yard. This former office building has been transformed into a stylish yet practical family house, one which Emily’s family and their architect are justifiably proud of. Hugo Mason sums up: “In its days as an architect’s office the building saw many clients who claimed to have much experience of building projects. For me, this finale had to be the winner – Emily claimed to be lacking in experience and yet flair, perseverance and good teamwork has re-created an exceptional house.” SEPTEMBER 2009 WYEVALLEYMEDIA.CO.UK
11